Mosque developer claims a classic NYC background

FILE - In this Aug. 24, 2010 file photo, Sharif el-Gamal, developer of the planned Cordoba House and mosque in lower Manhattan, comments on a speech by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg during a dinner in observance of Iftar at Gracie Mansion in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, Pool, File)
— AP

FILE - In this Aug. 24, 2010 file photo, Sharif el-Gamal, developer of the planned Cordoba House and mosque in lower Manhattan, comments on a speech by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg during a dinner in observance of Iftar at Gracie Mansion in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, Pool, File)
/ AP

FILE - In this Aug. 24, 2010 file photo, Sharif el-Gamal, right, developer of the planned Cordoba House and mosque in lower Manhattan, looks on as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during a dinner in observance of Iftar at Gracie Mansion in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, Pool, File)— AP

FILE - In this Aug. 24, 2010 file photo, Sharif el-Gamal, right, developer of the planned Cordoba House and mosque in lower Manhattan, looks on as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during a dinner in observance of Iftar at Gracie Mansion in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, Pool, File)
/ AP

NEW YORK 
Eight years ago, Sharif El-Gamal was just another ambitious striver from Brooklyn, casting about for career leads and dreaming of a grander future in real estate.

A handful of modest deals later, he's sitting on one of the most politically charged projects in recent city history: a plan to build a 13-story Islamic cultural center, health club and mosque 300 yards from the World Trade Center memorial.

At age 37, El-Gamal now finds himself being castigated daily on network television as everything from an insensitive agitator to an Islamic supremacist.

The whirlwind has, by all appearances, caught him by surprise.

El-Gamal referred interview requests for this article to his publicist, who said he needed more time to gather information. In the few interviews he has done, he has insisted that when he set out to buy a building for the YMCA-style center four years ago, he never gave a thought to its proximity to ground zero.

Even after criticism of the project moved from the right-wing blogosphere to mainstream newspapers and television, he appeared to take the hostility lightly.

Sounding more like Donald Trump than an Islamic ideologue, he told the cable news channel NY1 in a recent interview that the controversy might actually help fundraising for the center, which he said would be "an iconic building" and which has a projected cost of over $100 million.

"Absolutely," he said, grinning broadly. "I want to thank everyone for taking so much interest in this project."

That kind of sarcasm is classic New York, and El-Gamal has taken pains to claim a classic city background, too.

The blond, blue-eyed son of a Polish mother and Egyptian father, El-Gamal spent time as a child in Liberia and Egypt, where he said his father worked for Chemical Bank, but he graduated from New Hyde Park High School on Long Island.

El-Gamal took classes at several New York colleges but never got a degree, then married a Long Island woman.

In an interview with The New York Observer, El-Gamal said he got into real estate as a residential sales broker, then moved into commercial sales and in 2006 began putting together a few deals of his own with money he borrowed from banks, relatives and friends.

Today, his business portfolio is small by New York standards. It includes a handful of apartment buildings and a mid-size commercial building in Manhattan, which he bought with partners and which included a medical clinic owner whose Egyptian parents were killed on an EgyptAir flight that plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean in 1999.

El-Gamal said he came from a fairly nonreligious family but became more devout after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In an interview with New York magazine, he said that after the attacks, he "just felt like praying." He began attending a downtown mosque, then found a second one run by the imam who is now his partner in the proposed Islamic center, Feisal Abdul Rauf.

The inspirations for El-Gamal's current, controversial project lay not overseas, he said, but uptown.